It feels like a very long time ago that Kawhi Leonard became a Raptor, when everything got more serious and everything changed. The franchise had been caught in an escalating cycle of hope and failure, hope and failure, until LeBron James delivered the killing blows to the whole era, one game after another. To experience the Toronto Raptors is to come to terms with the frailty of hope.
So the Raptors fired their coach and traded their leading scorer and happened to get an MVP candidate back, and were finally among the high rollers. And with 29 games left the Raptors entered Friday night’s games with the fourth-best record in the NBA, a feeling of dangerous malaise, and the sudden idea that time is running out.